Put Your Social Media On Hold

by Startacus Admin

Hold - the innovative mobile app that helps students focus in school and gives them the opportunity to get rewards

These days, it’s rare to see anyone under 40 not glued to their phones. Whether we’re retweeting puppy videos, checking emails, or reading the news, a good portion of the day is, for a lot of people, taken up the little rectangle of knowledge. While it is a great benefit to be able to sit on the train home and write that important email you left a little too late, the online world always being at our fingertips, urging us to just take a little break to check what’s trending - because it might have changed in the last 10 minutes - is equally detrimental.

School, college, and university students sit in class on their phones and can spend more time on them than they do studying. But what better to combat the adverse effects of technology than technology?

Hold is a Norwegian EdTech startup looking to improve students’ focus and thereby the quality of their education.

The Hold app is simple: when in school hours, start the app and put your phone down! For every 20 minutes that you aren’t using the phone, you earn points. These points can then be redeemed with participating businesses for food, drink, cinema tickets, and Amazon gift vouchers.

Although we admit it is a little sad that we need incentives in order to put our phones aside for just a little while, the fact is we have a compulsion to check our phones every few minutes, and that’s before even mentioning all-new addictions that have arisen from technology. So an app like Hold can do some real good. And, according to the startup, 40% of Norwegian higher education students think so too, with over 130,000 users across Norway, Denmark, and Sweden.

After raising £800,000 in seed funding, the startup has relocated to London and has launched in the UK, where it has a greater opportunity to work with big brands, reach a larger student population, and work with experts in the field of addiction and social media. If we can get free food for not using our phones, we’re tempted to go back to school.

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